Sally Metzler
Chicago, Illinois, United States

The name Edvard Munch usually recalls his masterful painting titled The Scream (fig. 1). This iconic image from 1893 depicts a moody landscape inhabited by a ghostlike, androgynous, wispy figure, facing if not confronting the viewer. Elongated hands frame the head, pressing emphatically on the ears of a hairless ovoid head. Wide-open eyes and an even wider uncovered mouth vehemently express fear, anxiety, and desperation. A mysterious, shadowy couple crafted in dark blue approach the screaming figure from behind on a bridge, a bridge on a downward oblique perspective which nearly converges, if not crashes into our space. A railing along the bridge buttresses the figures from falling into the swirling blue below. Munch composed the sky by an aggregation of thick, curving horizontal stripes of intense hues of red and orange, punctuated by parsimonious doses of blue, heightening the dramatic aura of the work. The unforgettable central figure and emotion-laden landscape disturb the equilibrium of the viewer.

Munch described in his journal his precise intent when he painted The Scream.¹ The impetus for the work occurred during an early evening walk with two friends around sundown, the sun was “a flaming sword of blood slicing through the concave of heaven… sliced with strips of fire.” Further, he experienced a great scream—”I heard, yes, a great scream—the colors in nature—broke the lines of nature—the lines and colors vibrated with motion. … It brought also my ears into oscillations—so I actually heard a scream—I painted the picture Scream then.” Munch masterfully communicated this disturbing and threatening moment with his friends, composing what would become one of the all-time masterpieces in the pantheon of art.

However, Munch also painted portraits of a more personal, calm, and reflective nature. Notwithstanding the artistic acumen, a few deserve attention in the history of medicine. An exhibition at the London National Portrait Gallery² sheds light on life, family, and friends of Munch through the lens of his portraits, works in his oeuvre overshadowed by images such as The Scream, which has attained near rock-star status akin to the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Munch’s 1886 portrait of his brother Peter Andreas Munch Studying Anatomy (fig. 2) invites the viewer into the artist’s family life. Munch positioned himself behind Andreas, allowing the viewer only a blurred profile. The skull and open half skull resting on a table share near equal billing in the scene. His brother pensively sits before a white curtained window. The overall mood is peaceful and contemplative; Munch applied a limited palette of greens, white, browns, and beige in large blocks of color, eschewing the swirling and expressive brushstrokes characteristic of The Scream. Munch’s younger brother Peter Andreas (1865 – 1895) was the third of five children in the Munch family and, like his father, studied medicine and became a doctor. The brothers Edvard and Andreas shared a room and purportedly enjoyed a harmonious relationship.³ Andreas initially had difficulty finding work. Eventually, he began his career as a trainee at the Rikshospitalet (the National Hospital in Oslo), where he would meet his future wife, Johanna, after treating her for a sprained ankle. Family legend reports that during examination, the young doctor commented to Johanna, ” Oh, what shapely legs you have, miss.”⁴ Shortly thereafter he worked in Hadsel in the Norwegian Vesterålen islands.⁵ Tragically, Andreas contracted pneumonia and died at the young age of thirty, leaving behind a pregnant Johanna, who delivered a baby girl named Andrea after her father. At the time Munch sketched his brother, he would have had no way of knowing that the skulls portended the early death of his beloved brother. Yet now they appear all the more haunting and prescient as a recurring theme throughout Munch’s oeuvre. The painting of Andreas Studying Anatomy thus provided an historical record of this promising young Norwegian physician before succumbing to illness, and served as a memento mori on a personal level, commemorating Edvard Munch’s only brother.

Among his other medical portraits, Munch immortalized the Danish Professor Daniel Jacobson (1861-1939), a nerve specialist and psychiatrist who treated Munch 1908-1909 in the Psychiatric Department at Frederiksberg Hospital. The full-length portrait portraying Jacobson bursting with confidence, if not bravado, outraged Jacobson, who lambasted Munch’s painting as “stark raving mad.”⁶ Never far from controversy, Munch commented, “When I paint a person his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness. He himself believes, however, that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.”⁷

A double portrait visualizes an unnerving encounter between devoted long-time friends of Munch, Dr. Claudius Lucien Dedichen and newspaper art critic Jappe Nilssen, who wrote for the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet⁸ , and steadfastly defended Munch against his detractors (fig. 3). Dr. Dedichen practiced in Oslo and founded the Modum Tuberculosis Home in 1908. For years, he served as a physician for Munch. According to the 2025 exhibition label, Munch painted his friends during their visit to his estate at Ekley on the outskirts of Oslo. The elegant yet cozy room displays family portraits of Munch’s ancestors. The two figures dominate the picture, particularly Dr. Dedichen, nearly larger than life, standing and towering over the seated, slumped, enervated Nilssen.⁹ The actual discussion between the two remains unknown; the family of Dedichen surmised that the somber mood of the painting may have been owing to Dedichen’s despondence at his inability to cure his dear friend. This notion accounts for the oft-applied secondary title of the work, the Death Sentence.¹⁰

These medical portraits by Munch proffer insight into his artistic prowess in capturing the outward likeness of his sitters and displaying his exceptional talents in limning the inner circuits of the psyche. Subtly, and deftly nuanced, he communicates the emotional bonds between the artist and his subjects. Even more, these medical portraits present an informal history of Munch’s mental and physical health by illustrating the medical professionals with whom Munch sought treatment.

End notes

1. “One evening I was walking out on a hilly path near Kristiania—with two comrades. It was a time when life had ripped my soul open. The sun was going down—had dipped in flames below the horizon. It was like a flaming sword of blood slicing through the concave of heaven. The sky was like blood—sliced with strips of fire—the hills turned deep blue the fjord—cut in cold blue, yellow, and red colors—The exploding bloody red—on the path and hand railing—my friends turned glaring yellow white—I felt a great scream—and I heard, yes, a great scream—the colors in nature—broke the lines of nature—the lines and colors vibrated with motion—these oscillations of life brought not only my eye into oscillations, it brought also my ears into oscillations—so I actually heard a scream—I painted the picture Scream then,” reproduced in Munch, Edvard, The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth, edited by J. Gill Holland, University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Entry #34.
2. Edvard Munch Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, 13 March – 15 June 2025.
3. See Jacob Klafstad, Erlend Hem, “Colleague Peter Andreas Munch,” in Tidsskrift for den norske legeforening, 27 March 2012.
4. Næss A., Munch: en biografi. Oslo: Gyldendal, 2004: 22, 28, 147, 160 – 2, 170. This anecdote and source from Klafstad and Hem.
5. See Klafstad and Hem.
6. Jackie Wullschläger, “To hell with likeness,” review of the exhibition, Edvard Munch Portraits at the London National Gallery, in the Financial Times, “Life and Arts” section, 15/16 March 2025, p. 11. The painting is housed in the Munch Museum, see online catalogue for image and details: [https://www.munchmuseet.no/objekt/MM.M.00359a]; For more on Jacobson, see Henrik Permin, Jørgen Therkelsen, “The Danish psychiatrist and professor Daniel Jacobson (1861-1939) – as sketched by friends and patients,” Dan Medicinhist Arbog, 2004:215-35. [Article in Danish].
7. Wullschläger, p. 11.
8. The Dagbladet, among Norway’s largest newspapers, is still being published, and at the time of this article, it boasted over 1,400,000 readers
9. Dr. Lucien Dedichen (1867–1944); Jappe Nilssen (1870–1931).
10. From the exhibition label, Edvard Munch Portraits, 2025, London National Gallery, reference: https://www.npg.org.uk/assets/uploads/files/Munch-large-print-guide.pdf.